Re: learn2grow

**D* G* <d*@gmail.com>**

Look at Learn2Grow's stats on their own site.  48,044 members.  Impressive -
a little money and advertising and good partner can take you a long way.
 However, the measure of a site is interaction - only 381 blog posts and the
forums are not being used with latest posts in some areas 4 months old.
 Their conversation "groups" have 25 members or less.

With 44,000 members - and that level of participaation, the answer isn't in
new members.  That's old school thinking I'm afraid.

I'm not going to comment further  on what I think about the Learn2Grow
website or it's setup. That's their business model and your relationship to
them is your business.

But I will comment in a general way and say that you have to understand why
people go online and you have to deliver that kind of experience for them if
you want them to be successful.  And imho, scaling from the offline world to
the online world isn't as simple as building out a huge bit of software and
servers, spending a ton of bucks and running to the bank.

Take your own online experience.

You want answers.  Quick and easy to your questions.  The better you are at
searching, the quicker you expect results.   If you don't get what you want
in the first scan of the page - my guess is you back out of that site to the
search engine page and check again.  That's common behavior on the Net.

You want entertainment.  Sometimes.  And that's as varied as there are
individuals - so we're talking about an entire range of opportunities here.

You want community -   Research says that we can maintain 150-ish
relationships on average.  So sites that spend money trying to mimic
facebook or twitter and spend huge bucks on this  are sowing seeds in rocky
ground.

Having said that - while the opportunities for large corporations to do this
are limited - my experience is that opportunities for single authors to do
the exact same thing are wide-open.  The difference is in scale and
individual attention.

The really big guys (facebooks, twitters etc) will do mostly-OK - the really
small guys (us) can do fine.  The middle ground is a killing field.

And  it looks like I need a second cup of coffee (or is that the third) :-)

Doug

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Sheri Ann Richerson <
SheriAnnRicherson@exoticgardening.com> wrote:

> I have noticed this too. I got aggravated when I could never get an answer
> about an article I submitted and other articles were refused because they
> did not like the photos.
>
> I would love to know if anyone knows more. I do know they are going to have
> more sponsors than just Lowe's.
>
> Sheri
>
>
-- 
Doug Green @douggreen
Editor-in-Chief
SGF Publishing  www.simplegiftsfarm.com
_______________________________________________
gardenwriters mailing list
gardenwriters@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/gardenwriters

GWL has searchable archives at:
http://www.hort.net/lists/gardenwriters

Send photos for GWL to gwlphotos@hort.net to be posted
at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos

Post gardening questions/threads to
&quot;Gardenwriters on Gardening&quot; &lt;gwl-g@lists.ibiblio.org&gt;

For GWL website and Wiki, go to
http://www.ibiblio.org/gardenwriters